Java 8 being delayed into the first quarter of 2014.

The release of Java 8, originally due in September this year, has been pushed back. The new version's headline feature—Project Lambda, which brings anonymous functions to Java—isn't yet finished.

The reason for this delay is, in part, security. Over the past eight months, a large number of criticalsecurity flaws have been found and patched. This has damaged Java's reputation, with Apple, for example, reacting by removing the Java plugin from its Safari browser.

In response, Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java Platform Group at Oracle, has announced a "renewed focus on security" that will tie up engineering efforts. As a result, Java 8 has now been pushed back until the first quarter of 2014.

Reinhold explained that Oracle originally planned to release a feature complete beta of Java 8, Milestone 6, back in January. It failed to do so, however, due to the incompleteness of Project Lambda. Removing Project Lambda might have allowed Oracle to meet its original September release date, but this wasn't felt to be an appealing choice, as Project Lambda is the most important feature of the new version. Without it, there'd be little point releasing Java 8 at all.

The Oracle announcement is reminiscent of Microsoft's push for security that started in the first half of the 2000s. Bitten by multiple security flaws and an increasingly bad security reputation, the company made security a top priority, developing new processes and procedures to ensure that security was baked into product design.

This eventually culminated in the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2, in 2004. This Service Pack contained a raft of security improvements, and some Microsoft insiders claim that it demanded so much development effort that it contributed, in part, to the delays suffered by Windows Vista.